Improved inversion of geopotential field anomalies for lithospheric investigations

Instabilities and the large matrices which are common to inversions of regional magnetic and gravity anomalies often complicate the use of efficient least‐squares matrix procedures. Inversion stability profoundly affects anomaly analysis, and hence it must be considered in any application. Wildly varying or unstable solutions are the products of errors in the anomaly observations and the integrated effects of observation spacing, source spacing, elevation differences between sources and observations, geographic coordinate attributes, geomagnetic field attitudes, and other factors which influence the conditioning of inversion. Solution instabilities caused by ill‐posed parameters can be efficiently minimized by ridge regression with a damping factor large enough to stabilize the inversion, but small enough to produce an analytically useful solution. An effective choice for the damping factor is facilitated by plotting damping factors against residuals between observed and modeled anomalies and by then comparing this curve to curves of damping factors plotted against solution variance or the residuals between predicted anomaly maps representing the processing objective (e.g., downward continuation, differential reduction to the radial pole, etc.). To obtain accurate and efficient large‐scale inversions of anomaly data, a procedure based on the superposition principle of potential fields may be used. This method involves successive inversions of residuals between the observations and various stable model fields which can be readily accommodated by available computer memory. Integration of the model fields yields a well‐resolved representation of the observed anomalies corresponding to an integrated model which normally could not be obtained by direct inversion because the memory requirements would be excessive. MAGSAT magnetic anomaly inversions over India demonstrate the utility of these procedures for improving the geologic analysis of potential field anomalies.